Recently, bicycles are increasingly used to move short distances because traffic congestion and environmental pollution have become worse due to an increase in vehicle use. The bicycle, which is a kind of transportation means that is good for the health of users and which does not cause environmental pollution due to operation, can allow for efficient use of street spaces and enable individuals to move fast even if streets are congested.
Accordingly, the government and civic groups have actively encouraged the daily use of bicycles. As a part of those policies, the number of bike paths has been increased throughout the country and a policy for increasing convenience of bicycle use, for example, constructing bicycle parking lots where bicycles can be safely parked and kept at stations, terminals, shopping centers, public facilities, and residential areas, is in force.
Accordingly, various bicycle parking systems have been developed and used, and include systems such as an open type and a closed type, which can be further classified into a manual type and automatic type. However, these systems have the following shortcomings: the open type is contaminated by sunlight, dust, and rain and snow, and bicycles have a possibility of being stolen even if they are locked; a manual closed type, which is an individual closed type, requires users to manually operate the system and keep and return locks for individual lockers, so some users abuse the lockers and store things other than bicycles therein; and an automatic closed type, though convenient to use, is expensive, so it is difficult to construct the automatic closed type at a plurality of places.
In order to solve this problem, there has been proposed a ‘Double deck type bicycle parking unit’ in Korean Patent Application Publication No. 10-2011-0094410.
According to this document, while a bicycle is loaded onto an upper support, the rear wheel of the bicycle is automatically supported and it does not require larger force to move up/down a slider channel, so it is possible to conveniently load a bicycle.
However, this technology provides only the effect that relatively small force is required to load a bicycle onto an upper support, and force by a person is necessarily required to move a bicycle to a desired place or load a bicycle onto an upper support, so it is merely just a variation of a manual type storage facility.
Accordingly, it is preferable to implement the existing bicycle storage facilities into a movable automated type facility, and to this end, it may be possible to propose a technology of providing both of a loading rack that can keep bicycles in two stages and an automated stacker unit that can automatically load and unload bicycles onto and from the loading rack in a bicycle storage facility manufactured in the shape of a container.
However, when a long bicycle is stored in the bicycle storage facility, the front-rear length of the loading rack has to be increased, so the entire size of the bicycle storage facility is unnecessarily increased and the area that the bicycle storage facility occupies is also increased. Accordingly, it is difficult to ensure a space for constructing the bicycle storage facility, and this type of bicycle storage facility is also a manual type storage facility.